


If Not Now, When?

by autoeuphoric (FreezingRayne)



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 20:52:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1023254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreezingRayne/pseuds/autoeuphoric
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawkeye has never been one to ask foolish questions.  <i>What are you doing?  Why now?  Is this wise?</i>  The answers are obvious; there is no need to ask.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Not Now, When?

**Author's Note:**

> For my dearest bro, Ilitritfireprince, who was totally right about the FMA manga/Brotherhood being so much more satisfying than the original anime. Happy Birthday! I wish you cake and fair weather!

When the secrets of flame alchemy are finally revealed to him, the first thing Roy feels is disgust. 

True, the array is beautiful, elegant and intricate, and just by looking at it he can feel the buzz of alchemical energy, but he still can’t help wondering—what sort of man could do this to his own daughter? The tattoo must have taken days—weeks. And it must have been excruciating. 

Before he can resist, Roy has asked, “May I?” 

Riza Hawkeye tenses for a moment, her shoulder blades pulling in, the transmutation circle moving with the shift of her muscles. The moment passes, though, and she relaxes. “Go ahead.” 

He reaches out to touch, lightly, just the tips of his fingers. Her skin is smooth and warm, hot, in fact. Very hot. It’s not her skin, Roy realizes, it’s the circle. The array on her back is active and complete. The dead bastard closed it. Riza is walking around with an alchemical array on her back. She is a loaded gun, just waiting for an alchemist to come along and pull the trigger. 

“Does it hurt?” 

“Not anymore.” 

The array pulses beneath his fingers, and Roy can feel the delicate layering of symbols, the balance of combustible elements. He moves his hand down further along the curve of her spine. She sucks in a breath. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. He isn’t quite sure what he’s apologizing for. For the chill, the awkwardness of the situation, or the burden her father has asked her to bear. What he’s asking of her right now. 

She sits on a kitchen chair and he sits across the table from her, sketching on a broad pad of artist’s paper. Riza wraps her arms around herself and hunches. 

“If you want, I could take my shirt off too,” Roy suggests, attempting to lighten the mood. “At least then we’d both be cold.” 

Her shoulders shake, and when she speaks, he can tell it’s through a smile. “That’s alright.” She relaxes a little after that.

It takes him longer to sketch the circle than it should. The design is not hard to duplicate (all right, it’s not impossible) but he keeps getting distracted by the pale arch of her back and the smoothness of her skin and, when her shoulders have started to ache and she sits up straighter, by the curve of her breasts. His hands tremble as he draws. 

\--

The next time Roy sees Riza, she goes by Hawkeye and the desert wind blows hot in his face and sand stings the uncovered skin of his cheeks and hands. 

Her hair is chopped short and she’s in uniform, face scrubbed clean of any makeup, but that is not what makes her hard to recognize. It’s her eyes. They are as arid and empty as a sand dune. A dead man’s eyes. Roy has seen eyes like these before—staring back at him from out of the broken shard of mirror he uses to shave every morning, set in the faces of the new recruits shipped in from Central and South City, ears still wringing with government propaganda and the promises of glory. 

“Sir,” she greets him. In her hands are pieces of a dismantled gun: a sight and a long, slender barrel. She’s a sniper. 

 

After the war is over, when their bloody work is done, he watches her raise a mound over the grave of a nameless child, and he feels the link that binds them, traveling from her back to the tips of his fingers. 

“Burn if off.” 

All the breath in him freezes and cracks, despite the desert’s heat. “ _What?_ ” The word is frozen too—he’s surprised it doesn’t solidify and hit the sand. 

He puts up resistance at first. He agrees that the secrets of flame alchemy cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. 

_Or even the right hands_ , he thinks, clenching his own. 

It’s selfish of him—he knows that. Roy had been the one to use the power—reduced all those villages to ash and scorched sand, reduced people—human people—to their blackened, basic elements. 

But he doesn’t want to hurt her. 

 

She sits in the same chair in the same kitchen, in her dead father’s house. 

“Don’t you want me to…” Roy swallows. “I can get anesthesia.” 

Hawkeye shakes her head. 

“Opium, then.” Another shake. “Fuck, whisky, anything!” 

“No!” Hawkeye rips her blouse off over her head, so violently that one of the sleeves tears. She doesn’t bother to cover herself this time. The desert had disabused most of them of their modesty within the first few weeks. Her upper body is lean and muscled, hands and face tanned dark, while the rest of her is still pale. She is thin. Too thin. It looks as if she hasn’t been eating. 

She is still beautiful. 

Roy tries again. “You shouldn’t have to suffer.” 

Hawkeye looks round at him. “Yes, I should.” There is a waver in her voice that Roy has never heard before, not even when they were pinned down with machine-gun fire coming in from three sides. “They made you their weapon, Colonel, and years ago you made me yours.” Her eyes hardened. “Now, please. Take this away from me.” 

 

He braces himself for her scream, but it still tears through him, clawing at his insides as he holds a small, very controlled tongue of flame against the top left section of the circle. Her back arches and her knuckles go white where she’s gripping the back of her chair. Her whole body shakes in quick, epileptic shudders, a nauseating parody of passion. 

“There,” Roy says, pulling back. “I’ve removed a symbol. It’s useless now.” 

Hawkeye’s breath is harsh and ragged, the melted, blistered skin on her back staring at Roy like an accusing eye. She shakes her head. “No. You have to…have to take more of it. Just one symbol gone…” She breaks off to gasp, hands tightening on the chair until the wood groans. “Too—too easy to recreate.” 

She’s right. Roy knows she’s right, but his head is already swimming with the smell of burning flesh, and if he closes his eyes he’s sure he will wake up in Ishval, bodies piled around him and ash in his throat. 

He listens to Hawkeye’s labored breathing and opens his eyes. If she can endure it, he can inflict it. 

She refuses to go to a hospital, but she lets Roy treat the burns. He’s spent more than half his life studying flame alchemy—he knows burns. Hawkeye is nonresponsive for the first few hours after they are finished, and by the end of the night she is running a fever, shaking and delirious, calling out for people who aren’t there, people Roy has never even heard of. He stays with her to make sure she doesn’t roll onto her back. He makes her drink water, even if she vomits most of it back up. In the morning she is finally breathing evenly and Roy, exhausted, falls asleep on the floor beside her bed. 

In a couple of days the burns have healed enough that he is able to use salve on them. He rubs it onto her back with light passes of his fingers, feeling her breath stutter and her muscles jump. She makes a low noise of relief, fingers clenching into the bedclothes before releasing slowly. 

“Does that feel better?” Roy asks. 

She nods. “Yes.” 

For a moment he is afraid she’ll tell him to stop, but she doesn’t. Her breathing quickens. “Does it hurt?” he asks, pulling his hand back. “I’m sorry.” The salve is oily between his fingers, the smell sharp and medicinal. 

Hawkeye twists her neck, straining back to look over her shoulder. Her eyes are red and her cheeks sunken; she’s barely been able to keep food down over the past few days. “No, it doesn’t hurt.” Rolling onto her side, she grabs at his collar, pulling him close and kissing him, deep and desperate, her mouth burning hot. Roy curls his fists into the sheets—careful not to touch her—and kisses her back. 

The first day she is up and moving again, able to wear a light robe over her bandages, she makes a pot of coffee and sits down backwards on a kitchen chair. She pours for them both. “Thank you,” she says.

“For almost killing you? Or for taking care of you afterwards?” 

Hawkeye adds milk. “For both.” 

He wants to lean over and kiss her again, now that she isn’t lost in a haze of pain endorphins and desperate relief. But she is his Lieutenant now, and that wouldn’t be appropriate. He’ll need her with him later more than he wants her right now. 

\-- 

Central Command is a minefield. Even before he learns of the conspiracy so vast it stretches back to the lost city of Xerxes, Roy can feel the potential energy in the heartlines of the city, like an alchemical reaction just before it is released. Roy knows he is being watched, that his subordinates have been taken from him, that they are, for all intents and purposes, captives in their own homes.

Around 22:00, there is a knock on his apartment door and Hawkeye enters without being invited. She is in civilian clothes and her hair is down, her sidearm breaking the line of her jacket. She carries a half-closed, dripping umbrella; it has rained all day and on into the night. Roy sits up a little straighter, but he is already too drunk to come fully to attention. 

“Lieutenant,” he greets her as steadily as he can. “Were you followed here?”

Hawkeye sets her umbrella down and sits down across the coffee table from him. “Probably.” She shrugs. “I barely see a point in keeping track anymore.” 

Roy grunts. He pushes the bottle across the table to her. She wraps a hand around the neck but makes no move to drink. Her nails pick at the label. “I told Edward about Ishval.” There is no apology in her tone. 

“Good,” Roy says. “He’s just as much a part of this as we are.” The Elrics are a factor he never could have foreseen. As irritating as the kid can be, Fullmetal is fiercely loyal and cunningly creative in his pursuit of the truth, as well as a genius by anyone’s standards. Not that Roy would ever say it to his face. And even if he and his brother are most concerned with getting their bodies back to normal, at least they all have common enemies. 

“Are you alright?” Roy asks after a moment of nothing but the clock ticking out in the hallway. He blames the whisky. They don’t ask each other things like that; Hawkeye knows that he is considerate enough to keep his problems to himself, and he knows that she would tell him if there was anything so wrong it would affect her performance. Apart from that, nothing else matters. 

_You can’t even lie inside your own head_ , says a voice in his brain that sounds devastatingly like Hughes’s. 

Hawkeye’s lips quirk. “I’m not the one drinking alone, sir.” 

Roy jerks his head toward the bottle. “Get started, then, so I won’t be.” 

Hawkeye says nothing for a few seconds. Roy feels his cheeks heating beneath her gaze, and he blames that on the whisky too, because he couldn’t possibly be _blushing_. That would be ridiculous. Finally, she wipes the mouth of the bottle with her sleeve. She takes a firm swallow. 

“That’s not how you drink it,” Roy frowns, although he’s impressed she can do it without a wince. 

“Just trying to catch up with you, sir.” 

They trade the bottle back and forth. Roy is reminded of the times they sat around the fire, huddled in blankets, the endless black of the desert sky above them, foreign stars staring down accusingly as they shared a cup of cheap, dry Ishvalan wine. 

Roy’s head swims from the liquor. He thinks back to the night years ago, when Hawkeye wouldn’t accept any drink at all. “Does it ever still hurt?” he wonders out loud. 

She shifts her shoulders. “Sometimes. On hot days.” 

“I see.” This time when she reaches for the bottle, he catches her hand. Where his fingers are smooth and unmarked, protected by his gloves, her skin is callused and rough. To his drunk senses, the contrast is fascinating. 

“Colonel, what are—.” 

He raises her hand to his mouth and kisses her wrist, cutting off any need for an explanation. Hawkeye has never been one to ask foolish questions. _What are you doing? Why now? Is this wise?_ The answers are obvious; there is no need to ask. 

Instead she says “What if I was followed, sir? What if the Fuhrer’s men are watching?” 

He looks up at her, to see the smile that she is obviously trying to suppress. Standing up takes a lot of effort, but then he’s on the other side of the coffee table, on the sofa, and she is warm weight against him, not pulling away. “Maybe they’ll learn something.” 

Hawkeye laughs and kisses him. The world swoops, and again, he blames the whisky. His Lieutenant kisses the way she does everything—deliberately, intention heavy in every movement. Roy doubts Riza Hawkeye has ever done anything halfway in her life. That thought settles heavy and warm inside him, helped along by the sensation of her lips on his neck, by her hand tracing down his abdomen to tug at his belt. Then the hand gets inside his trousers, and she makes a questioning noise. 

His face heats. “I…sorry, I may be a little too drunk for this,” he admits. Fucking whisky. 

She chuckles against his neck. “I’m used to your performance problems, sir. You’re useless in the rain.” 

\-- 

Roy sits in his own private dark world. He catches bits of what the doctor is saying—things like irreparable damage and ruptured vessels—but the roaring in his ears is too loud, all the way up to the very end of the speech. 

_Nothing can be done_. 

The roaring stops. There is silence, and Roy grips tight to the hospital bed beneath him, afraid that if he lets go he will spin out into this abyss of nothing. Nothing to see. Nothing to be done. _Nothing_. 

“I’m very sorry,” the doctor says. 

“I understand,” Roy responds. “Thank you for telling me.” 

He waits until the doctor’s steps fade down the hall, before he lets out a shuddering, watery breath. He hasn’t cried in a very long time, but along with his sight he seems to have lost his inherent ability to hold it together. 

Weight settles beside him on the cot and chilly hands press against his cheeks. Roy stiffens for a moment, but then he hears the sound of her breath. 

“You should be resting,” he says, choked. 

“I’m fine.” Hawkeye takes one of his hands in hers and raises it to the bandages at her throat. Her pulse beats under his fingertips.

“How are the Elrics?” he asks, after a moment. 

“Edward’s a little banged-up. Alphonse is extremely malnourished and dehydrated, but the nurses say he’s going to be fine.” 

Roy nods. His breath shudders in and out. “I wish you didn’t have to see me like this.” 

Hawkeye laughs. “Pardon me, sir, but don’t be an idiot.” Without Roy realizing it, they have negotiated their bodies so that he is resting against her and she is stroking her fingers through his hair. She smells like the hospital soap, which is to say, like nothing at all. But she’s here—his Lieutenant, his Riza. The last thing he had seen before the transmutation had ripped him apart was her bleeding on the cold stone, but here she is, warm and alive, and if that means he will never see again, then so be it. 

\-- 

When the crackle of the transmutation and the pain in his eyes have faded, the first thing Roy sees is long blond hair, golden eyes, and a thin face. “Fullmetal?” 

But no, _that’s_ Fullmetal, standing next to the first boy, arms crossed, a look on his face that says he is concerned but is trying hard not to show it. The first boy’s nose is sharper, body slighter, and when he shakes his head and smiles, his grin is infectious in a way his brother’s isn’t. 

“Wrong Elric.” His voice is familiar, although it is strange to hear it without the hollow, metallic echo. “Welcome back, Colonel Mustang.” 

“I was blind, not dead,” Roy says, though he smiles back. 

“So the philosopher’s stone worked, then?” Major Armstrong is standing by the window, massive shoulders blocking out the light of the late afternoon sun. “You can see?” 

“Of course it worked,” Ed says. “They always work. That’s why it takes so many lives to create them.” He scowls at the floor. 

“Brother—,” Alphonse begins.

“It’s alright,” Roy says. “I know what it cost, and I doubt you will ever let me forget it, Fullmetal. I wouldn’t want you to.” Ed looks up sharply. “All I can do is vow to make their sacrifices worthwhile.” He offers him his hand. 

After a moment’s hesitation, Edward takes it, and Roy is surprised to find himself gripping a warm, slightly damp palm, rather than cool metal. That’s right—they have all been put back together again. 

Roy turns to the man sitting beside him on the cot. “Thank you, Doctor.” 

Marcoh nods. “My pleasure.” His smile tugs at his cheeks, making his ruined face even more hideous, but right now, Roy is happy to look at anything. 

Along with the doctor, the Elrics, and Major Armstrong, Havoc is there, leaning against the wall, crutches set beside him. Marcoh had repaired his spine with the stone, but it will still be awhile before his legs are strong enough to support his full weight. 

“All these blondes here to cry at my bedside, and not a single one of them is a beautiful woman,” Roy comments. “Although some of you are pretty enough to be girls.” 

“Shut up,” Ed snaps automatically. 

Roy arches an eyebrow. “I was talking about Havoc.” 

“Thanks, sir.” 

Alphonse snorts into a closed fist, even as Edward fumes. 

 

He knows she’ll come eventually, but he’s too restless to spend any more time in the hospital. So he gets dressed and leaves, despite the nurse’s protests, despite the fact that his eyes are watering and it hurts to focus. According to Dr. Marcoh, it may be a few weeks before his sight is totally normal again . 

He finds her a few blocks away from Central Command (or what used to be Central Command) overseeing a reconstruction project—crews of men and women hired to remove rubble and erect temporary shelters for those who’s homes were destroyed in the coup, many of them working for free. She is turned away from him at first, face in profile, the last burst of autumn sunlight making her glow. She looks angelic, and Roy grins at how annoyed she would be if he told her that. 

When she sees him, her eyes widen and she takes a few steps closer before remembering herself. She stands up straight and brings her feet together. 

“Lieutenant.” 

She salutes. “Sir!” 

“At ease.” At arm’s length he stops, raising a hand toward her face. “You cut your hair.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“I like it.” 

“Thank you.” 

Roy wants to touch her. He wants to spin her around in the street and kiss her until neither of them can breathe.

Instead, he shrugs out of his jacket. “I hope you’re prepared, Lieutenant.” He turns to face the work crew, who are currently excavating a felled apartment building, searching for survivors. “We have a lot of work to do.” 

Hawkeye smiles. “Yes, sir.”


End file.
